Meet the Team: Tulsi

A woman is looking directly into the camera in a close-up picture of her face. She has dark curly hair and is smiling.

Tulsi Achia (pronounced thoul-see andachai-ah).

Hi I’m Tulsi and I am a Registered Psychologist and current PhD candidate of Indian origin, based in Australia. My interest in mental health within the academic context comes from mental health work done across educational, community, and clinical contexts for over a decade, as well as lived experience of mental illness. I have a personal and academic interest in the influences of disability, race, class, gender, and sexual identities in the construction of social and psychological experiences of people.

Although we are fortunate to live in a time where there is greater awareness and acceptance of mental illness and vulnerabilities in people, we still have a long way to go. Academia and university settings, especially at higher levels (graduate and beyond), tend to feel unsure at best, avoidant on most days, and marginalizing on worse days, in their response to mental illness and the idea of psychological vulnerability in its best and brightest.

I am very excited to be joining a community of like-minded people who not only understand vulnerability, but live it, struggle with it, celebrate it and build connection through it. I sincerely hope that our articles and stories help you navigate the messiness of life and life within academia. In my work with the Academic Mental Health Collective (AMHC), I hope to write and curate articles, as well as coordinate activities that create a normalizing narrative around mental illness and mental health vulnerabilities within academia.